Inside iTV - Interactive commerce services for broadcast digital television

Interactive television (iTV), i.e. the enhancement of the television viewing experience by the addition of multimedia content and services beyond the basic video and audio playout of a program, has a great potential for commerce, education and entertainment. By enabling the delivery to the home of rich multimedia content in coordination with broadcast television content, iTV can serve as a powerful platform for widespread home shopping and distance learning, among many other applications. The advent of high-bandwidth channels into the home, such as satellite, terrestrial, two-way digital cable and DSL, enhances iTV's power and the prospects for its acceptance. iTV has the potential to move from a curiosity to a common television enhancement, possibly with the ubiquity of the VCR. Despite this, iTV has failed, to date, to fulfil its promise. While many fully mature technologies have taken years to find wide acceptance, in the case of iTV some issues can be isolated which can explain its slow approach. Before commercial iTV applications can gain wide acceptance, elements of the iTV network infrastructure must mature from their current state. Among these elements are those relating to the adoption of open standards and the enablement of purchase security and purchase tracking capabilities. For it to become commercially viable for network operators to offer iTV purchasing services to their subscribers, the capability must exist for every purchase transacted by a user to be fully secure and private, to be accounted for, and to be traceable. TV-based systems must be robust, user-friendly, and have reasonable response times. In this paper, we present an architecture and a suite of commerce-related services for iTV networks designed to fill in some of the gaps in the current iTV software infrastructure, based on our experience in prototyping iTV systems. These services are of three types: operator services, advertiser services, and user services. After a brief review of current iTV commerce systems, our proposed approach is described in detail. Finally we relate the details of one implementation of this architecture and these services in a prototype iTV environment. This successful proof of concept instantiated an iTV system with advanced commerce services as developed in the proposed architecture.